The Baloney Detection Kit

Hmmmm I want one. I wonder where they sell them?

Galactic Center

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

How small do you feel now?

Christopher Hitchens

Love him or hate him, Mr Hitchens is always fun to watch. I don't always agree with him (his views on Iraq for instance) but you can't say that he pulls his punches. He's ruthlessly honest about his opinions and happy to stand up for them. Enjoy.

Earthrise.

JAXA and NHK videos from the high-definition television camera aboard the Kaguya Lunar orbiter.



Stunning.

Eyes . . .

Nativity. . .

I took this picture years ago. It's a nativity scene outside a department store in Madrid.
WTF? Flipper was present at the birth of Jesus?


How come SpongeBob SquarePants didn't get an invite?

Gold, Frankincense & Tuna.

Once

It was a slow morning at work so I decided to bung my copy of "Once" into my laptop and leave it playing in the background.

I ended up watching it all the way through. I love this film.

I saw it for the first time last year. My sister-in-law had given it to me as a present and, I have to say, at the time I was a little disappointed (don't tell her that!). However, she's got excellent taste and I'd heard some great reviews, but I'd also heard the negative ones so approached it with caution.

It's a Marmite film. You will either love it or hate it.

It's, and I shudder to use the word, sweet. Really, really sweet. Not in a vomit inducing way, but a warm, fuzzy, sad, funny, uplifting kind of way. A really touching tale of two ships that pass in the night. It got labeled as a musical on it's release, it's not. The music is integral but it's not a musical in the "Chicago" sense.

The plot focuses on a busker with dreams of making it as a successful musician, he's also dealing with the breakup of a long term relationship. He meets a young Czech immigrant and together they realise that they share a love of music and are both in similar emotional situations. The actors wrote and performed the songs in the film and are so talented it makes me ill.

Give it a chance. Go on.

Schrödinger's cat.

The Window Hope Has Opened . . . .

then gets hit with the brick that rationalism threw and lands on the pavement that reality provided.

Daniel Dennett Lecture "A Darwinian Perspective on Religions: Past, Present and Future"

Dan Dennett is a towering figure in the world of philosophy, this is a video of a lecture that I was lucky enough to attend a few months ago.

Richard Dawkins says in the introduction that he's the kind of philosopher that scientists like. That's because he's spent his entire career keeping pace with what the scientific community are doing.

It was a fantastic evening.

I highly recommend his book:

Voice Over . . .

Last night I was up quite late finishing a Voice Over I've been doing for a video game. At least with all the advances in home studios I don't always have to travel up to London to do this sort of thing in a professional studio. A decent mixer and microphone and you can do it from home.

However..... This is an example of some of the dialogue.

"The purpose the game is to position the orange ball in the large circle so that it matches the one in the smaller circle.
This can be achieved by using your controls to click on any ball which is surrounded on all sides.
This action will cause the rotation of all the balls around the one that has been clicked to rotate anti-clockwise which will move the orange ball in the direction that is required"

Now... try reading it aloud so that it sounds interesting and makes sense.

It's not as easy as it looks! For some reason the phrase "This action will cause the rotation of all the balls" caused me to corpse repeatedly. In the end I got it done and mailed off the wav files to the client.

However, because it had taken me so long to get the above section right, and because I hated the way it was written, I included 1 extra file in the folder. I present it to you below.

New songs......

I've added 3 new songs to the "Tunes I Like Right Now..." section.

In The Name Of Love by The Thompson Twins

Magic by Mick Smiley

Savin' The Day by Alessi

As you may have guessed these are all from the "Ghostbusters" soundtrack and are therefore brilliant. I'm getting all excited because the Blu Ray is out this month!



Who you gonna call?

Saturday morning ritual....

The one thing I HAVE to do on Saturday mornings is have the radio tuned to BBC 6. Actually, the word radio is inaccurate as it's a digital channel that I get through my Sky box.

Saturday, BBC 6, 9:00am = Adam & Joe.

They've been sounding the horn for geeks like me for quite a while now and have had a small but loyal following since their TV show on C4 years ago.

Radio is a great fit for them. The music is usually great but you listen because you want to know what they thought of the new "Star Trek" movie and the like.

Nerd Nirvana.

Here's a video by one half of the team, Adam Buxton, that he made for the Spoon song "Don't make me a target." This wasn't the official video. But it should have been. Check out his YouTube channel here.

Snuff Box.

A short clip from the very underrated TV show "Snuff Box" that starred Matt Berry and Rich Fulcher.

It was, and is, genius. Shame nobody tuned in.

Don't watch this if bad language offends you. Because you WILL be offended. When I saw this sketch for the first time I didn't stop laughing for twenty minutes.